I am a very serious, formal person but I can be more laid back and relaxed at times (such as when I am with friends I'm comfortable with). In therapy I am usually stiff and formal. I don't smile a lot and my posture is very erect.

I have had 14 sessions with my psychiatrist so far and it is kind of a love/hate relationship. She herself has said that she is not a conventional therapist; she's very "in your face" and she withholds nothing. I am glad that she tells the honest truth and sugarcoats nothing but I am blown away sometimes by her perceived lack of tact.

Anyway, at my last session I broke loose once from my stiff persona and I smiled very widely. (I'll tell you now that I am an attractive girl (although other people see my beauty more than I do...) and I know that I do have a very nice smile). A bit later in the session, my psychiatrist was telling me that she had noticed the shift and commented that my "smile had even been sexy!" We are both heterosexual females and I don't believe that this comment was coming from a place of malevolence, but I was very shocked nonetheless.

She knows that I have been sexually abused by men who were in positions of authority (a camp counselor and a group home staff member), that I am now completely turned off about sex (read: I have no interest in sex or a romantic relationship WHATSOEVER), and that I loathe having any womanly curves (and I am only an A-cup!) that might be sexually appealing to males. I believe that she should have known that calling me sexy is the last thing I want to be called.

So immediately after she called my smile "sexy" (she did say my SMILE was sexy but she doesn't pay as much attention to the details of the words she uses as I do, so I don't know if she was really calling ME sexy or not), I said, "OKAY. Let's move on to something else" and I changed the topic of conversation.

What do you think about a therapist telling their client that their smile is sexy? Do you think that I was overreacting by being so turned off by it?